Cyclist
GOAT Bingo: What does Tadej Pogačar still have left to win?
For Tadej Pogačar, it feels as though he is collecting race wins like Pokémon cards. He’s now won (take a deep breath) Strade Bianche, Paris-Nice, Tirreno-Adriatico, Volta a Catalunya, the Tour of Flanders, Amstel Gold, Flèche Wallonne, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Il Lombardia, the Slovenian national title, a rainbow jersey, the Giro d’Italia and three Tours de France. That doesn’t even mention his other victories in races like the GP Montréal, the UAE Tour, Tour of California and Tour of Slovenia. As of the time of writing, he has a whopping 86 race wins to his name.
If he wasn’t already considered the GOAT – the greatest of all time – then he’s certainly on track to get there. Eddy Merckx has already admitted that Pogačar is ‘above him’, although he clarified his comment to say he was referring to the World Championships, and that Pogačar needs to win a lot more to be remembered as better than him overall. Still, Pogačar is currently 26, and has achieved more than Merckx had at the same age, even if the Belgian ended his career with eleven Grand Tour wins and three rainbow jerseys, as well as wins at all Monuments.
With the Triple Crown now done and dusted, there are no debates surrounding the Slovenian’s stratospheric status as the best rider of the 21st century. However, his place as the greatest cyclist of all time is still up for discussion. There are always more races to win, and more records to break. Here are just a few of the goals he can set if he truly wants to be hailed as cycling’s all-time greatest.
Milan-San Remo
To open proceedings, let’s remind ourselves that Merckx won 19 Monuments throughout his career. In fact he won all five Monuments more than once. With this in mind, it’s clear that Pogačar needs to win a good few more Monuments to become the greatest of all time and build on his current tally of six.
Milan-San Remo has been a key target in Pogačar’s season for some years now. Often touted as the hardest Classic to win, more in terms of tactics than strength, the Slovenian has struggled to impose himself on the rolling Ligurian profile. He has tried attacking on the final climb of the Poggio in the past three editions but has seen little daylight between himself and other favourites.
Attacking on the penultimate climb of the Cipressa has been debated for a couple of seasons. UAE Team Emirates have tried to tee this up, but the likelihood of this working on this parcours is slim. It hasn’t been pulled off for a long time.
For Pogačar to win, he needs to catch his rivals sleeping, particularly if Mathieu van der Poel is in attendance. Pogačar’s shown that he can win from a reduced group or an attritional situation, so perhaps he needs to try and bring forward a group of talented puncheurs with weaker sprints in order to take the Classicissima title. He might have to wait until Wout van Aert and Van der Poel have lost some of their top-end acceleration in their early 30s, however.
Paris-Roubaix
This one might be a little tricky. Paris-Roubaix is a specialist’s race, and one that Pogačar has so far avoided during his career. Rarely has someone debuted at the race and won immediately, but it is possible. In fact, it happened relatively recently in the rainy autumn edition in 2021 when not just the winner but the entire podium consisted of debutants: Sonny Colbrelli, Florian Vermeersch and Mathieu van der Poel.
Paris-Roubaix is also a risky race, hence why Grand Tour contenders dodge the cobbled Classic like the plague. The danger of crashes and injury is ever-present, and avoiding incident as as much a question of luck than anything else.
That said, Pogačar is no ordinary Grand Tour contender. He has won the Tour of Flanders and showed immense strength on the cobbles of northern France during Stage 5 of the 2022 Tour de France, which took on many of the cobbled sectors included in the Hell of the North.
His savvy bike handling and race positioning are also suited to Paris-Roubaix and should keep him out of danger. Regardless, the threat is still there that a crash or cobble-induced injury would jeopardise the Slovenian’s later Grand Tour ambitions.
Realistically, Pogačar would need to target the cobbled race over multiple seasons. My best guess is to say that Pogačar will start riding Paris-Roubaix in 2026, and should win it before 2030. His chances may rely on the likes of Van der Poel, a two-time winner of the race, and Van Aert dodging the race at some point soon, opening the door for a long-range move or a reduced bunch sprint win.
Vuelta a España
The Vuelta holds a special place in Pogačar’s story. It was there, after all, where he burst onto the Grand Tour stage in 2019 with three stage wins and a podium finish in Madrid at the age of just 19.
Having now won the Giro and Tour, the Vuelta title seems like it’s there for the taking for the Slovenian phenomenon. The UAE Team Emirates leader had his chance to win all three Grand Tours in 2024, but opted not to race the Vuelta. He has hinted that he might set his eyes on the Spanish race in 2025, though a lot could depend on how the Tour will pan out and the nature of the route for the 2025 Vuelta.
The race for the red jersey in Spain is also considered to be the least targeted of the three Grand Tours. Few riders go into the new year with the Vuelta as their number one goal. For Pogačar, this should mean that there should be less pressure on him going into the Vuelta, which could be handy on the back of what will be a tough Tour de France.
Out of all of the races he’s still to tack off on this bingo sheet, the Vuelta is the most achievable. Perhaps this will come next year during the Slovenian’s rainbow year as World Champion.
More Tours de France
Let’s bring Merckx back into the picture. He won five Tours de France during his career, a record he shares with Jacques Anquetil, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Induráin. Surpassing this record sounds like a challenge well within Pogačar’s reach. He could even complete the feat before his 30th birthday, which is in 2028 by the way.
At this year’s Tour de France, Pogačar seemed to be on a completely different level from his rivals. Yes, Jonas Vingegaard came into the race after recovering from a serious injury suffered in the spring, but Pogačar was pushing numbers he had never done before. UAE Team Emirates rose to the challenge with an armoured roster packed with Grand Tour contenders in their own right. Adam Yates, João Almeida and Juan Ayuso are all tied down by contracts for the foreseeable future, plus Visma-Lease a Bike’s grip on Tour supremacy seems to be slipping.
Pogačar went through both the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France with no hiccups, unlike the Grand Tours he’d raced before. Maybe this was a lucky streak, but he seems to have learned from the mistakes of the 2022 and 2023 Tours. Time is on Pogačar’s side, and he seems to have the measure of his younger rivals such as Remco Evenepoel, who is probably in the Tour fight for the long haul. On current form it seems unlikely that any rider will be able to unseat him in the next three years at least, which means the three-time Tour winner has every chance to set a new record for Tour wins sooner rather than later. Even if Vingegaard ruffles him once more, it’s far from ludicrous to suggest that Pogačar could claim his fifth Tour title by the end of the decade.
Olympic gold
The opportunity to take Olympic gold might have been the one that got away. The Paris 2024 Olympics route looked perfectly suited for Pogačar, although Evenepoel played a tactical blinder on the day and fully deserved his win. It leaves us wondering what could have been, but there are still another two good chances for Pogačar to win an Olympic gold during his career.
In 2028, the Olympics will be held in Los Angeles. Pogačar claimed his first UCI WorldTour win at the now-disbanded Tour of California back in 2019, so he knows how to win on American roads, which is important because American racing can differ quite drastically from the European circuit. Of course, at this point we have no idea what the route will look like for either the road race or time-trial, but judging by the terrain around Los Angeles, the road race course is likely to feature some punchy hills – ideal for Pogačar.
Four years later, the Games will head to Brisbane, Australia. Pogačar will be 33 when these Olympics come around. If he hasn’t already won gold by then, the hilly Queensland terrain might support another Slovenian bid for the Olympic title.
Perhaps the IOC should add a stage race to the programme to secure Pogačar the gold.
The Tour de France stage win record
Sorry, Mark Cavendish. I know he spent years hunting this record down, even extending his career just to achieve it, but Pogačar is on track to obliterate the Manx Missile’s record of 35 Tour de France stage wins by the time he calls time on his career. Cavendish is well aware of this threat, and joking told Pogačar, ‘Don’t break it’ after claiming the record in Saint Vulbas earlier this year.
As Cyclist told Pogačar in our podcast interview, he has averaged 3.7 stage wins per Grand Tour so far in his career. If he carries on at this pace, Pogačar could break Cavendish’s record by 2030. For context, Pogačar will only be 31 years old at this point.
Even if Pogačar stops being a GC rider, he could easily hunt breakaway wins if he wants to specifically target the record.
Any other business
Now for the minor races, by which I mean achievements that would be the cherry on top of the cake rather than the cake itself.
The Critérium du Dauphiné stage race has thus far alluded the Slovenian. This pre-Tour race may have been pegged as a kiss of death for Tour contenders in the past, but recent champions like Chris Froome and Vingegaard have won the Dauphiné before claiming Tour titles the month after. Targeting the race would mean a change to his pre-Tour schedule, however, with altitude camps seen as the optimal preparation for the Tour nowadays. Still, bagging this one-week stage race would undoubtedly add a little more razzmatazz to Pogačar’s CV.
Apart from the Dauphiné, and perhaps some more cobbled wins at the likes of E3 or Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, there’s not much left to target outside of the Grand Tours and Monuments.
Outside of pure race results, Pogačar has already birthed a youth team, the inventively named Pogi Team, and he supports a number of charitable causes. In other words, he’s already a long way down the road in terms of legacy building. Maybe like Merckx, Pogačar will release a brand of bikes soon. Maybe he’ll release a selection of food products to go alongside his range of supermarket sandwiches. When it’s Tadej Pogačar we’re talking about, anything seems possible.
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